Artists framing architecture(s).
A non-edited and not yet organized archive of artists' works, which include signature architectures.

Sunday, 19 October 2014

Bernd Behr + Mendelsohn

Still from Bernd Behr, House Without a Door, 2006, 16min 32 sec, High Definition video, colour, stereo.

In 1943 the US Army
commissioned architect Erich Mendelsohn and RKO Radio Pictures to design
and build a replica Berlin housing estate to test incendiary bombs for
the Allied war effort. Borrowing its title from the lost
proto-expressionist film The House without a Door (Dir. Stellan
Rye, 1914), the work approaches the surviving structure through a
series of documentary and constructed set pieces. These re-enact
imagined screen tests or outtakes, tracing an oblique trajectory from
1920s German expressionist films such as Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse (1922) and F.W. Murnau’s Faust
(1926) via the film noir of 1940s émigré Hollywood to a contemporary
housing development in a place called ‘Faust’ near the Utah test site.
The film features a commissioned soundtrack by Marcus Fjellström
reflecting the anachronistic timeline of the film.